Fanning the Flames
by LeonaWriter
Summary: Approximately half a year after his battle with Naruto at the Valley of the End, Sasuke is found in that same place by Konoha nins. But it seems he has his own reasons for returning. Ones that he won't easily let on.
1. Chapter 1

Fanning the Flames

_If you observe the flow… it continues flowing, without ever stopping. To mark that battle_… - Hatake Kakashi, chapter 234 of Naruto, about the Valley of the End.

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Otherwise, a lot of things would have happened Very Differently. This is only my take on a fandom favorite.

---

It had been raining for three days at the Valley of the End.

People would look into the distance and mutter amongst themselves, about how it had to be an omen – and a bad one, at that. The Valley of the End had ever been a place of endings, of severed ties, of deaths. Many wondered whose blood it was washing down its river this time, and how much had been spilt to need three whole days to clean from the stone statues and surrounding area.

In truth, there was no blood. In fact, there was only one person there… one person and no opponent. Unless you counted that very person as his own opponent, and even so it would have been a purely mental battle – there were no marks on the terrain at all.

In the slew of rain, the figure was barely visible, even to the most trained of ninja. Dressed in blue and black, and with black hair that was made slick by the downpour, he was camouflaged better than most could have hoped for, and he had not even had to try.

He had hardly moved in hours, sat on the soggy ground with his knees almost parallel to his chin, hair dripping onto shorts and soaking to the skin. Contrary to the rest of him, the area surrounding his eyes was mostly dry, only wet where the rain had slid down his forehead or from his hair. The black eyes had a hard quality to them, barely moving and only blinking every once in a while, such as when water logged up on his eyelids. Other than that, it was as though he was caught staring at some sort of middle distance that only he could see, a place and time far away from the deluge.

As time went on, a little of the light and self came back to his eyes, causing him to focus on what was in front of him instead of what had been behind him. A spark of resolve slowly came into existence in them, almost unnaturally focused on the thoughts in his head and the ideas coming into fruition there.

A hand went slowly to one of his pockets, from which he drew out a length of dark blue material with a shaped piece of metal attached to the middle. In the centre was a symbol. Swirl with point on the bottom. Leaf.

A Konoha hitae-ate. The sign of a Leaf shinobi. Which. . . he was not. Not any more.

His fist tightened around the cloth and metal, causing ignored pain in his slick hand that could not easily grip from sweat, water and old blood from his memories. His eyes narrowed and his hand gripped tighter just once more, but then suddenly loosened, letting it fall free and then catching it again by the dark blue cloth. For a while he stared at it as though the simple item held all of the answers to life's mysteries. Finally though he sighed and rubbed it clean of pocket lint and absorbed mud so that it once again shone. Then, as though performing a deciding action that could mean his own death, he tied it around one of his arms, so that it caught the light only just coming through the treetops and creeping out from behind the clouds.

The rain, however, did not stop.

---

AN: First Naruto fic, at least first to be posted on the net at all. I definitely did not expect to have Sasuke (yes, that is him) to be the main character, but he's the one it's about, and he's the only one who's in every or almost every chapter.

Next one should have other characters, and possibly some other members of Team Seven, but no Naruto as yet (which is why there's no Main Character Two slot filled up there).


	2. Chapter 2

Fanning the Flames

Chapter Two

"_Oh... me? Well, my name is Hatake Kakashi.. I have no desire to tell you my likes and dislikes.. dreams for the future.. hmm.. and I have lots of hobbies.."_ Taken from his introduction to Team Seven.

---

There were rumours and chaos abroad in Konoha, the hidden village of the leaf.

The rumours said that Uchiha Sasuke, missing-nin for nearly six months now, had been found and returned. They differed mostly in the specifics, such as whether the boy was alive or dead, whether he had been found by ANBU or turned himself in. Suspicion was rife that the whole thing was a trap, created so that Konoha would accept the boy in so that the traitor could infiltrate their ranks with the trust of having been a Konoha shinobi before slaughtering them all in their sleep, like his brother had done to the rest of his clan before him. Still others believed in an optimistic view that had him cast as a tragic hero repenting of his sins and begging to be forgiven of his crimes to become one of the village's strongest and most loyal shinobi in due time.

Most of the time everyone was wrong. Sometimes they were right. But no one person, not even the Hokage, knew the whole story.

At the moment, the Uchiha was inwardly irritated at being imprisoned in the Konoha hospital, under the supervision of a high level medic-nin – it was only a cold, for goodness' sake. Nothing a real ninja couldn't handle, and certainly not something for anyone with such high skills as the nin they'd assigned to him – and various ANBU were positioned at regular intervals around his location, some of which he could even see.

None of these things, however, could get him to talk. They wanted to know Orochimaru's plans, what he was doing, who was with him, what their weaknesses and strengths were? They could go and find out for themselves. That wasn't what he had come back for.

Idly, he unfurled and dangled the hitae-ate he had used to be found from his hand. It had been stolen, from a victim of Sound, and Sasuke had never even known their name, or their face. Only that they had been a loyal Konoha ninja. But above all, he had been someone who was ultimately only mortal, who had died, who had allowed his forehead protector and symbol of allegiance to be taken off of his dead body by someone who had gotten his own scratched and then thrown it down on the ground next to his still-living opponent.

He had been leaving his past as a Konoha shinobi behind, but also making one more step away from his brother's shadow. Itachi had used a kunai to slash a scratch right through the middle of his leaf symbol to declare his position as a missing-nin. Sasuke had thrown away that thing that, even so small, might have people comparing him to his brother once again.

And now – a new one. Or, technically, an old one reused. It made no difference in the long run. A hitae-ate was still a hitae-ate.

He wouldn't put it on yet, though. He wasn't quite ready for that step, and for that matter, neither was Konoha.

The crinkle and flip of a paper page reached his ears from across the room, and his eyes shot towards the man who had been his sensei before his defection, then averted his gaze. Maybe because he didn't feel like looking at the man for too long, the person who had the sharingan of one of his teammates and had taught him personally.

At the crinkle and flip of another page a minute later however, he rolled his eyes. It could well be quite simply that he didn't want to see the pervert reading his porn.

"So," Kakashi said, breaking the silence which had enveloped the room ever since the med-nin had gone out to consult with his interrogators. "Did you have a reason behind what you did, or was it just to get attention?"

That was another thing about his old sensei. He could be meaning how Sasuke had gone to Sound and was now back, but he could also mean the way in which he had come back. It was all up to him as to how to interpret the question. A technique that had been used by all of the others at some point or other, but all the more dangerous when used by Kakashi because of how he said it, goading you on so that you said more than you meant to. With the others, Sasuke had used a foolproof method – not to speak or react at all. He had simply immersed himself in memories of the past few weeks, and let current events mostly slide past him. With Kakashi, though. . .

Sasuke snorted, a step short of a sardonic laugh.

"I'm not like Naruto, Kakashi," he said, intentionally leaving out the –_sensei_. The man had made no indication as yet that Sasuke was still seen as his student except be there.

Another crinkle and flick.

"You have a point there." A pause. "He's not here, you know."

Sasuke took in that piece of information and digested it slowly. Naruto was not in Konoha. Kakashi was talking about this freely. Meaning that the dobe was off on a training mission or something similar; it was official, at any rate, or the man in front of him would be more worried than this.

Perhaps he had thought that Sasuke had come back to Konoha in order to finish what he had started, and kill Uzumaki Naruto? _Heh. Not likely_...

He let his head fall back onto the mostly flat pillow of the hospital bed and crossed his arms behind his head.

"Hn. Doesn't matter."

Kakashi's single visible eye narrowed slightly in what Sasuke suspected was concentrated thought. The jounin let out a low, soft, "Really?" before turning his whole attention back to the book.

Through the closed and locked door, raised voices could be heard.

Sasuke closed his eyes and forced calm upon himself to combat the feelings of anger the sounds brought him.

---

"But Hokage-sama-! The boy is dangerous to have simply wandering around in our village, as though nothing has happened!"

Tsunade, her arms crossed as she leant against the hospital corridor wall of the secure ward – named so not because of the severity of the injuries, but the security that was needed to patrol around it – narrowed her eyes.

"If you'd been listening to what I'd been saying, you'd know that I was never going to let the brat just wander around Konoha as he likes! Besides, there's a jounin in there with him right now and several ANBU watching them, if you hadn't noticed. I'd be rather surprised if the kid managed to so much as sneeze without _someone_ noticing."

"As I'm sure you're aware, Hokage-sama, that same jounin is the one that let the Uchiha run off to Orochimaru in the first place!"

" 'That jounin' was spending all that time trying to stop him from doing just that! It's not his fault if the idiot boy chose to run off instead of listening to him – you might as well say that it's Konoha's fault for not having everyone know the future before it even happened or something stupid like that."

The woman elder in front of her thinned her lips and narrowed her eyes at the suggestion that there was nothing the ninja community could have done about the temporarily missing nin. For a moment the two women stared each other down, the verbal argument not entirely the same one that was spoken through their looks. Koharu frowned, but didn't turn away.

At the faint sound of a sneeze from within the room just behind them, however, Tsunade looked away with a sigh and put her hands on her hips.

"I don't have the time for this. I'm going to decide what to do with him, since he is under my jurisdiction as a ninja in this village – even if he isn't one of us any more. Got that?" The elders glared, but none said anything. "Good. Then I'm going to- "

"You mean that you're just going to _trust_ him? Forgive me if I'm wrong, but..."

"I'm not. The brat in there might be a kid, and a stupid kid at that sometimes," she added as another sneeze made its way through the thick door, "but I know better than you that he's a dangerous, stupid brat of a kid. So far as I could tell there weren't any mind-control jutsu of any kind on him, but they aren't my speciality. We can only hope that he chooses to talk sometime before someone decides he's good for target practice – kami know I was tempted just now."

With that, she turned away from them and left, heading in the direction of the emergency and intensive care wards. Once she was far enough away, she meant to took her frustration with the elders out on one of the harder cases they had after reminding the ANBU not to take their eyes off of her other 'patient'.

_Well_, she thought as she headed over to a likely looking candidate, _I sure as hell don't think this day could get any worse. Though by my luck, that's about as likely as staying sober after a bottle of sake. . ._

---

"So. What do you think?"

Kakashi blinked lazily. It had now been over an hour or more since the elders had left the hospital area in which Uchiha Sasuke was kept in and only slightly longer since Kakashi had left his old student to meet up with the Hokage in her tower, away from untrustworthy listeners-in.

"Depends," he said. "I don't think he needs to stay there, at any rate. It's only a cold."

Tsunade looked at him long and hard, and for an instant he wondered if she had taken him at face value.

"If I wanted your medical opinion, Hatake, I would've asked for it," she said, illustrating her point with a fist to the table. "You know damn well what he's in there for."

"Hm..."

"Well?"

"I don't know."

"You..."

"He didn't exactly say all that much, Hokage-sama."

"He didn't say anything at all while I was there, Kakashi. So if he said even one word to you – that's more than we had before. Kid was practically acting like a vegetable!"

Kakashi sighed and brought out his notepad, on which he had copied out a transcription of his and Sasuke's conversation in the hospital room. Careful to include any relevant body language and other such responses, he told her what he knew. That Sasuke had an ulterior motive for being in Konoha. That he wasn't still interested in killing Naruto, so far as they knew. That he had not spoken to a single soul until left alone with his old sensei went unsaid, but not unheard.

The notebook flipped shut and was pocketed again in a single movement.

"That's all."

Tsunade nodded, her head slightly above her hands, which were fisted a little way above the table.

". . . Sheesh," she said at last. "That brat of yours is definitely a whole load of trouble. You were his teacher. Would _you_ let him out there?"

"Alone? Hell no. I was thinking of putting him back as a genin. On probation. That way, by being back on Team Seven, he would be constantly surrounded by people he knew before he defected as well as the ANBU that would be assigned to watch him. Also, this would mean that he would neither be taken down in rank nor promoted to the rank of his year mates, allowing him to know that he is not being isolated and shunned or treated like some sort of returning hero, either.

"Hopefully, all of this combined would bring back some of his loyalty to Konoha. If it does, then good. His status as a full shinobi of Konoha is reinstated. If it doesn't, then the 'probationary' part of the clause kicks in, and he would be dealt with accordingly."

"Back on your old team, huh? You sure that's a good thing?"

Kakashi smiled dangerously, creasing his mask slightly.

"We'll know that once he's done his first few missions, once he's been given the all-clear, Hokage-sama. It's hard enough for any genin to be given D-ranked missions the first time around, I think."

They shared a look. Tsunade smiled, similar to Kakashi's own just moments previously.

"I like it. Brat's not getting one foot out of that room for at least another day, though. Let him stew a bit. And once he is out. . . you've taken responsibility for him. I don't want the brat out of your sight even once until I have proof he can be trusted out of it! Got that?"

Kakashi sweated slightly. Well, he had asked for it.

"Got it, Hokage-sama."

---

AN: ...Kakashi's Team Seven. He is. All right, I was planning to have Sakura in this chapter as well, but it didn't work out, and here you are. I figured they'd be a _little_ suspicious of him at first, so no going straight back into Konoha's open arms with this fic.

This was a hard chapter in some places. But I do like Kakashi n_-


End file.
